


At The End Of It All

by Sovvie118



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: Blood and Injury, Established Relationship, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, Panic Attacks, Polyamory, Serious Injuries, Trauma, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-10-30 06:23:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20809997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sovvie118/pseuds/Sovvie118
Summary: A look into what might have happened if Eddie had survived after the events of IT: Chapter 2.Poly-Losers' Club in an established relationship.Paired with the askpolylosersclub blog on Tumblr.This was painful and traumatic to write I'm SO glad it's over   ;-;





	At The End Of It All

_“Richie, Honey- Honey, he’s dead.”_

Beverly hears the words as if someone else said them.

_‘He’s dead’ _she repeats in her mind; each time she hears it again it becomes more and more real and it draws a shaky sob out of her thin, pressed lips. She can’t bring herself yet to look at Eddie’s face.

Instead she watches Richie’s eyes behind his glasses, stubborn and unyielding until he cracks and turns away. As he’s turning, she sees his features screw up in pain like a last-ditch attempt at holding himself together.

But he comes _undone_.

“W-w-we have to go.” Bill says thickly, distantly, like he doesn’t really mean it and Beverly hears the quiver in his voice, but as Richie gets a hand on the back of Eddie’s neck and pulls him in against himself, none of them move to stop him.

Bill gets to his feet and lets out a shaky gasp, and Beverly can sense that he’s desperately holding back a sob. Tears are streaming down his face and he looks away from the group with his hands in his hair as if he means to pull it out. His shoulders are trembling under his flannel shirt.

His display of weakness seems to get to Mike and Beverly suddenly senses that he’s unsteady on his feet. She’s too far away to get to him but luckily, Ben seems to have had the exact same thought and he quickly goes to Mike to get an arm around him. Ben rarely ever cries but even from here she can see that his cheeks are wet, glistening streaks cutting through the smudges of dirt. She can faintly hear him say ‘Stay with me, Mike’ but her instincts tell her that what he really means is ‘_If you lose it, then I’ll lose it, too and I can’t do this by myself. Please, Mike, stay strong for me_.’

Mike appears to understand this, too and he briefly touches his forehead to Ben’s, looking him in the eyes and giving him a brief nod. They’re both shaking. Richie’s broken sobs fill the empty silence.

_“I can’t do it I can’t do it oh god what am I gonna do I can’t-” _

Beverly feels herself coming apart, too, and she drops to her knees beside Richie. This time, she can’t help but look at Eddie’s face against Richie’s shoulder and the sight of it makes her feel cold in her chest in a way that she doesn’t know if she can ever recover from. 

_‘He looks so cold,’_ she thinks, as she rests her cheek against Richie’s back to look at him more closely. She knows that this image will be burned into her mind forever but this is one of the people she _loves_ and she’s almost scared to stop looking at him. Tears blur his face but still she keeps staring, before she finally blinks them away with an _‘oh, Eddie’_. She can feel how much Richie is shaking.

_“Bev-”_

She screams so hard that Ben, Mike and Bill all come running over. Richie goes tense beneath her and almost immediately stops crying. All of them are silent, then, as Beverly repeats Eddie’s name softly over and over, as if she can’t quite believe that the sound came from him. She touches his cheek with her shaking fingertips, watches the slight twitch at the corner of his eye in response to the stimulus and screams again, this time almost triumphantly.

“_He- he’s alive_! He’s still alive!”

It’s a frantic rush, then, as they gently move him away from Richie to try to properly stem the flow of blood coming from Eddie’s abdomen. Bill rips off his flannel overshirt and they tie it tightly around Eddie’s waist. When he flinches and groans a little, Bill sighs shakily and briefly kisses Eddie’s forehead with a whispered _‘It’s okay, Baby, we’re gonna get you out of here.’_

Ben helps Bill and Richie get Eddie to his feet but he’s barely lucid and can’t stand. Everything around them is starting to collapse.

“Put him on my back,” Bill orders, resolutely, crouching as Ben, Mike and Richie carefully lift Eddie’s unresponsive form. Bill hooks his arms under Eddie’s thighs and they position his arms across Bill’s shoulders to try and keep his weight forward so he won’t fall off. Bill tries to ignore the damp feeling spreading on his back that he knows is Eddie’s blood seeping through their makeshift bandage.

They let Bill lead their exit from the sewers, clearly deciding at this point that if they don’t manage to get Eddie out of here, then none of them are leaving. It’s a slow, torturous journey. Eddie frequently slips off Bill’s back and has to be secured, eventually, by them binding his wrists together in front of Bill’s neck with a piece of fabric torn from Ben’s shirt. Richie is talking to him the whole time, a heartbreakingly one-sided conversation that they all have to listen to in the dark. He tells Eddie funny anecdotes about moments from their past, all the while with a shake in his voice, and in each silence that follows where he patiently waits for a response and there’s none, Bill feels his heart shatter into smaller and smaller pieces. Each time, he feels _himself_ listening carefully, too, for even a mumble beside his ear, something, _anything_ to fill a silence that is so painful he wants to scream into it.

Climbing up through the well is the most difficult part, but Bill insists that he can do it even with Eddie on his back. None of them question him but the fear is in all of their eyes, even after Mike and Ben have climbed up first and Bill has started his ascent seemingly without an issue. They have to tie Eddie’s legs around Bill’s waist, too, so that he won’t fall back and strangle him while he climbs, but even with the extra weight of Eddie’s body and his arms pulled in tight either side of Bill’s throat, he still drags himself to the top, sweating and shaking and coughing, as Ben and Mike pull him over the edge.

Beverly decides to go last. She couldn’t bear to see Richie, still drenched in Eddie’s blood, standing in the dark beneath her on his own, so she pushes him to go ahead. He protests, clearly worrying for her despite his obvious desperation at Eddie being out of his sight but she insists and forces a smile to try to reassure him.

They all make it out of the house just as it collapses, ending up covered head-to-toe in a thick layer of grey dust. They detach Eddie from Bill’s back as Ben pulls his car over to where they’re standing and Beverly opens the back door. Richie climbs in first, cradling Eddie’s head carefully in his lap as Mike and Bill lift him into the car across the back seats. As Bill closes the door, Mike pulls on Beverly’s hand to direct her towards his own car.

“C’mon, Bev, we’ll follow them!”

She wants to look at Eddie again but the rear windows on Ben’s Range Rover are tinted black and she can only see the vague shape of him lying in Richie’s lap. Bill gives her hand a brief squeeze and a reassuring but tearful look as she turns to follow Mike to his car. Bill jumps into the passenger seat beside Ben and they immediately pull away far too fast. Mike goes after them just as speedily. Nobody seems to be too concerned for their own safety at this point.

“Which way!” Ben asks suddenly, glancing at Bill as he changes through the gears with worrying speed, “Which way to the hospital?!”

“I…I d-d-d-_fuck_! I don’t remember!” Bill stammers, opening his window to lean out as if that will help him to see the signs better.

“BILL!” Ben swerves the car out of the way of an oncoming light pole just as it nearly smashes right into Bill’s head, “What are you _doing_?!”

Bill ducks his head back inside quickly, looking behind him briefly at Richie and Eddie, “Eddie was always the best with d-d-direction-”

“He’s still bleeding guys…it won’t stop…” Richie says weakly over the top of Bill. There’s a quiver in his voice and his face crumples up as he starts crying again. He’s holding one of his hands firmly over Eddie’s abdomen but there’s blood seeping through his fingers.

Bill doesn’t know what to say suddenly. All of the life briefly drains out of him and he just looks at Richie, pressed against the left-side door of Ben’s car, frightened and pale and desperate as he clings to Eddie. He wants to reach back and put his fingers against Eddie’s neck to test his pulse but he doesn’t dare.

“It’s okay,” he says instead, looking Richie directly in the eyes as Richie looks right back at him, “We’re gonna get him to the hospital and he’s gonna be okay, Rich. He’s gonna be fine.”

Richie looks like he doesn’t believe it but he nods and draws in a shaky breath. There are tears dripping off the end of his nose and the lower halves of the lenses of his glasses are fogged up.

“I FOUND IT!” Ben screams suddenly, doing almost a U-turn in the road at a sign for Derry Hospital. The car tires screech on the road and the whole vehicle tilts ever so slightly to one side, as if that side of it might have actually lifted off the ground just a bit, “We’re nearly there!”

Bill turns back to Ben. His knuckles are white against the steering wheel and although he’s not crying anymore, the clean track lines down his cheeks are clear evidence that he has been. He looks in the rear view mirror, next, sees Mike and Beverly through the windshield of Mike’s car. Even from here he can tell that Beverly is still sobbing and he wishes that he could do something to comfort her, to comfort any of them.

In the back seat, Eddie coughs and a fresh mouthful of blood bubbles out from between his lips and down his chin. Richie is holding his hand but it’s so cold_, so, so cold_ that it scares him.

“BILL!” Richie is hysterical, now, “BILL, PLEASE! HELP!”

Bill is climbing into the back of the car through the gap in the front seats before Richie can say anything else. Ben seems to be struggling to focus, frequently glancing in the rear-view mirror to look at them and Bill seems to sense it.

“Ben, keep your eyes on the road!”

Ben immediately looks back ahead, just as another car knocks his wing-mirror clean off, and he has to swerve to avoid more damage than that. There’s the blare of a car horn but he doesn’t slow down.

Once Bill is in the back with Richie and Eddie, he doesn’t quite know what to do. When he wasn’t looking at Eddie, he could stay a little distant from it and remain in control of the situation but now, Eddie is lying right in front of him, bleeding and pale, almost lifeless; the pain cuts into Bill with an intensity he didn’t even feel with Georgie, all those years ago and it knocks him breathless. Fresh tears roll down his own cheeks but then-

_“Bill…Bill please- Please help me I can’t…” _

Richie.

Bill quickly wipes his own tears away, reaching down with a shaking hand to Eddie’s neck and placing two fingers against his pulse. His skin is like ice but there’s a faint throb against his fingertips every second. He’s still hanging on, but just barely.

_‘Don’t leave us, Eddie,’_ he thinks, _‘I don’t think any of us will be able to take it if you do.’_

Richie is inconsolable, watching Eddie desperately as he holds his shaking palm against the wound on his torso. He just keeps saying ‘I can’t do this’ over and over quietly to himself, and shaking his head. Bill is worried that he’s completely losing it.

“Richie…Rich, look at me!” He holds Richie’s face in between his palms, guiding his attention to him, but in Richie’s hazy eyes he can see that he’s starting to look like he doesn’t know where he is, “Richie, stay with me, okay?! We can’t do this without you!”

He shakes him a little, patting at his cheek but it doesn’t seem to do much good. He’s still just mumbling incoherent phrases that sometimes have Eddie’s name in them.

The car suddenly stops, then, and Bill can hear Ben jump out, followed by him screaming ‘HELP US! SOMEBODY HELP US! PLEASE! WE NEED HELP!’ The next part is all a blur. The car doors are pulled open and Eddie is lifted out onto a waiting stretcher. Richie grabs for him and cries harder and screams at them to leave him alone but Bill holds onto him tightly to stop him, although he can’t stop crying, himself, while he’s doing it.

When Eddie has been rushed inside the hospital, everything gets much worse. After getting Richie out of Ben’s car, he’s hysterical and none of them can calm him down. He screams Eddie’s name at the top of his lungs until his voice breaks, as if he doesn’t know where he’s gone. His glasses get knocked off as Bill and Mike have to basically wrestle him to sit down because he’s hyperventilating.

Ben and Bev rush inside the hospital to go after Eddie, but Beverly keeps looking back at Richie and sobbing.

By the time two medical staff come outside to see what the commotion is about, Richie is just beyond any level of inconsolable grief that Bill has ever seen. He tries to fight the male and female doctors when they come near him, even with Bill and Mike holding him, and he’s breathing so fast that Bill is sure he’s going to pass out soon. He’s still screaming, demanding that they tell him where Eddie is, and after a while his voice gives out and he’s clearly overexerted himself. Bill moves his leg out of the way just as Richie doubles over and vomits onto the ground at their feet, and he and Mike rub at his back. Mike gives Bill a solemn look across his bent over form.

Another bed is wheeled out of the double doors with two more EMTs and after a struggle, they manage to give Richie a shot that calms him down almost immediately. He goes limp and heavy, and Bill and Mike both have to assist the staff in getting him onto the stretcher because he still doesn’t want to go and he cries more pathetically each time either one of them moves away from him, no matter how many times either of them tell him that it’s okay or try to console him. Thankfully, the effects of the drug really kick in as they’re wheeling him through the doors and he passes out.

Inside the hospital, they’re taken to where Eddie has been rushed into surgery and told to wait outside as Richie is put in a room nearby to sleep. Ben and Bev are sitting in the waiting room already, filthy and bloody in a stark contrast against the white hospital walls and plastic, blue chairs. Beverly pulls both Bill and Mike towards her as she sees them and the four of them hug all together in a group. Bill feels like he can breathe a little again.

“Where’s Richie?” Beverly asks quietly, voice quaking and thick with fresh tears because she knows the answer already.

“They gave him a shot,” Mike says calmly, “He’s okay.”

Bev sobs again and Ben kisses firmly at her cheek, watching her with all of the love and concern in the world as he takes hold of her hand in his own. Bill takes her other and locks their fingers together tightly.

“What did they, uh-…what’d they say about Eddie?” Mike asks, then, as he sits beside Ben. Bill has never heard Mike’s voice shake in the way that it does when he says Eddie’s name. He feels a stab in his heart and releases Beverly’s hand to sit beside Mike and take his instead. Mike smiles at him gratefully with tears in the corners of his eyes.

“They just…said to wait and see…” Ben says slowly, quietly, and nobody else speaks again for a long time. Doctors and nurses rush past in the corridor, some with other patients, some who seem to have been called into the operating theatre at short notice. Each one of _those_ makes all of their blood run cold.

A nurse comes to them, then, to let them know that Richie is awake. Bill tries to stand immediately but Beverly stops him and shakes her head.

“No, Bill, you’ve done enough. Just stay there, Honey. It’s okay.”

Mike holds tighter to Bill’s hand and he sits back down, but he watches Beverly leave as if it pains him to let someone else deal with a difficult situation.

When Beverly enters Richie’s room, it’s dark, aside from the steady beep and flash of a heart rate monitor they have him hooked up to. He’s lying on the bed on his side, looking completely and utterly spent. She ignores the chair set up nearby and crouches at the bedside instead, face to face with him.

“Sweetie, where are your glasses?” she asks quietly, kindly, trying to divert his attention to something else, but he doesn’t look at her. His gaze is distant.

“I don’t want them,” he says blankly, although there’s a hitch at the back of his throat that she sees him swallow away.

“But you won’t be able to-”

“I don’t wanna see anything.”

She holds back a sob of her own, but her lip trembles anyway. When she reaches over to brush his hair away from his face, he looks her in the eyes and says, barely a whisper, “He’s gonna die, isn’t he?”

“_No_,” she says quickly with a shake of her head, but she starts crying again, she can’t help it, “No, Rich, you can’t…don’t say that…”

She thinks back to herself saying it earlier. About how _stupid_ she was. She wishes she could take it back.

Richie is crying again, too. He tucks his arms around himself and pulls his knees up to his chest, turning his head into the pillow, but Beverly gets up to sit on the edge of the bed and when she does, he gets up to meet her, sinking into her arms and sobbing into her chest. She holds him tightly, and something about the broken sound of his tears causes her to stop crying. Instead, she rocks him against her body, placing kiss after kiss against the top of his head.

_“Baby, it’s okay. I’m here.”_

Ben comes in then, too, slowly and timidly, as if he’s worried he came to the wrong room. When he sees Richie and Beverly, he goes over to sit beside them on the bed, stroking at Richie’s hair and his back. He and Beverly share a look and Beverly thinks that Ben looks as if he’s been crying again, too. She pulls him in to gently kiss at his forehead.

When Richie finally pulls himself away from Beverly, he looks at Ben with wet, glassy eyes and flushed cheeks.

“Have they…have they said anything else?”

Ben’s eyes crinkle a little, like it pains him to tell Richie no, but he shakes his head, squeezing the back of Richie’s neck comfortingly. Richie looks for a while like he’s going to say something, stops, then gets up off the bed, despite Bev and Ben’s protests. They’re holding him steady at either side.

“Get these things off of me,” he mumbles irritably, pulling at the wires for the heart rate machine. Ben tries to stop him but Richie moves his hand away lazily, “I’m gonna puke.” They manage to sit him back down and Beverly grabs a paper bowl from nearby that the nurses must have left there and puts it in front of him just in time. Ben holds Richie’s hair back from his face and rubs at his back.

“I can still taste his blood in my mouth-” Richie says after a while, muffled, before retching again. One of his hands is gripping the bowl and the other is clasped on Ben’s knee like he’s trying to hold himself upright.

“I’ll get him some water,” Beverly says softly, handing the paper dish to Ben instead to hold in front of Richie as she gets up to leave the room.

“Did you get it all out?” Ben asks after a long silence, rubbing at Richie’s shoulders. Richie doesn’t move but he mutters a vague ‘U-huh’ into the bowl. Ben chuckles a little but there’s no humour behind it at all. He puts the bowl of vomit aside as Richie slowly sits up.

“Just keep that nearby,” Richie motions in the general direction of it, sighing and closing his eyes, “I don’t know if I can do this anymore…”

“You can,” Ben slides his arm around Richie’s shoulders, tucking his damp hair behind his ear gently.

“How long do we have to wait?”

“As long as it takes. All that matters is that they’re taking good care of him, right?”

“I just wanna see him, Ben,” Richie has started to cry again, into one of his hands. Ben pulls him into a hug from the side and Richie just leans against him, weak and broken.

“I know,” he presses his lips to Richie’s left temple, voice muffled slightly against him, “Me too.”

It’s seventeen long, hopeless hours until they’re finally allowed to see Eddie. They fall asleep in the waiting room through some of it, holding hands in a line. Richie doesn’t. He watches every second on the clock, every doctor or nurse who passes them by, every door opening and he’s so sleep-deprived and traumatised at this point that every sound is _so_ acute it might as well be happening right inside his brain.

The doctor warns them that it might be difficult to see, that they should prepare themselves, that he’s over the worst and in a stable condition but it could change at any time. Richie doesn’t hear any of it. He blocks everything out except Eddie’s name.

He wishes that he’d listened.

It’s the hardest thing he’s ever had to look at since he saw Stan in a similar way.

Eddie is attached to so many machines that if he was awake, Richie might be making a joke about having a bionic husband. As it stands, he’s never seen anything less funny. There’s a thick tube down his throat –oxygen, obviously- and two drips –one IV fluids, one blood-; those are the only things that are obvious to Richie. Everything else is completely alien to him and it scares him a little, to see all of these things keeping the person that he loves the most in the world, alive, while not understanding how.

_Eddie would know what all of these things were._

“He’s going to need more blood transfusions in the coming days and it’s not going to be easy,” the doctor, who has followed them into the room, tells them, “I won’t go into the details with you right now but if you could come and see me-”

“We will. Thank you,” Mike smiles and the doctor nods and leaves them alone with Eddie.

Richie gets to his bedside, first, but he can’t take it and he has to walk away crying. They all wonder how he has any tears left. Mike goes to comfort him straight away, arms sliding around Richie’s shoulders to pull him in close. “_I know_,” he whispers, resting his head against Richie’s.

Bill, Ben and Beverly stand next to Eddie’s frail form together, Bev in between them with one of their hands in each of hers. Nobody seems to know what to say. They stand silent aside from the soft beep of the many machines in the room and Richie’s faint whimpering into Mike’s shoulder.

“He looks so…fragile…” Beverly finally says, quietly, and Richie and Mike come over now, too, as if to see what she’s talking about.

“He would hate this so much, you guys…” Richie finally says, suddenly. He smiles a little as he’s looking at Eddie’s face, and it makes them all feel a tiny bit better, “He fucking hates hospitals.”

Bill reaches down to touch Eddie’s cheek lightly, brushing his fingers up to push his hair off his forehead, “He’d be mad that his hair is messed up and dirty.”

Ben chuckles, nodding, and they all smile.

“Well,” Mike looks around at them all, “We’ll just have to make sure we get him some stuff to make him feel _extra_ comfortable while he’s here.” He looks at Richie, “Right, Rich?”

Richie huffs out a single breath of a laugh and nods, “I can’t see his face properly, so when he wakes up, tell him that I said he looked beautiful.” He crouches beside the bed to look more closely, folding his arms on the edge of it and holding onto Eddie’s hand.

“You can tell him yourself, Rich,” Bill chuckles, stroking Richie’s hair fondly.

“You guys think I’m gonna be able to _speak_? Wow, you have more confidence in me than I have in myself.”

“I think that Eddie won’t mind what you say. He’ll just be happy to see you,” Ben adds, and Richie looks up at him with his eyes filling with tears again.

“_Why_ the _fuck_ would you say that, Ben? WHY? I _just_ fucking stopped crying, like, five seconds ago.”

They all laugh as Richie moves away to wipe at his eyes with the corner of his shirt and Ben mutters a ‘sorry’.

They stay there until the doctor comes in to tell them that it’s time to leave, sharing funny stories about things that Eddie does, what they love about him, what he might do and say when he wakes up.

Before they leave, each of them leans down to kiss his forehead or his cheek softly.

In the weeks after, each one of them donates their own blood to be given to Eddie, all at separate times. The doctors say that his recovery is nothing short of a miracle, and that their blood must have magical properties. It’s a joke, of course, but behind the scenes the nurses gossip about how lucky the man in room number 7 is to be alive and he comes to be known to them, coincidentally, as ‘Lucky Seven’.

Eddie Kaspbrak wakes up two weeks after first arriving at Derry Hospital.

Alive.


End file.
